Identity Aware Security

Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions typically manage authentication, which verifies a user’s identity, and some basic authorization functions. However, IAM systems primarily focus on controlling who can access a system by managing identities, user roles, and permissions at a high level.

Authorization, on the other hand, refers to the more detailed process of determining what a user can do within a system once they are authenticated. Advanced authorization solutions, like those provided by PlainID, go beyond simple role or identity verification to enforce fine-grained, context-aware access control policies. These solutions allow dynamic decision-making based on user attributes, environmental factors, and relationships to resources, delivering more granular control.

• IAM: Manages identities and basic access control, ensuring users are authenticated and assigned roles.
• Authorization solutions: Provide detailed, context-aware access control, determining what actions a user can perform, often integrating with IAM systems for more sophisticated policy enforcement.

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions primarily focus on managing and governing who has access to resources by handling identity lifecycle management, access requests, role assignments, and compliance auditing. IGA ensures that users are assigned appropriate access based on their roles and responsibilities and supports processes like certification and entitlement reviews.

In contrast, authorization solutions focus on what users can do within a system after they’ve been granted access. Advanced authorization platforms, like PlainID, provide real-time, fine-grained control by dynamically enforcing policies based on context, user attributes, relationships, and environmental factors. This allows for more detailed and adaptive access control than the static permissions often managed by IGA systems.

• IGA: Manages identity lifecycles, roles, and governance of access rights.
• Authorization: Enforces detailed, real-time access policies, determining the specific actions users can perform based on dynamic context and policies.

While IAM (Identity and Access Management) and IGA (Identity Governance and Administration) solutions do provide some level of authorization, their focus is typically on authentication (verifying user identity) and managing user access rights through roles and permissions. These solutions generally handle high-level access control, often using static role-based models (RBAC) or group-based permissions.

However, advanced authorization goes beyond what traditional IAM and IGA solutions offer. Specialized authorization platforms, like PlainID, provide dynamic, fine-grained access control by evaluating context, user attributes, relationships, and policies in real time. This allows for more sophisticated, flexible, and scalable access decisions that adapt to the complexities of modern applications, APIs, and distributed environments.

IAM and IGA solutions can manage who can access a system, dedicated authorization platforms determine what a user can do with highly granular, real-time policy enforcement.

PlainID provides a centralized console for creating, managing, and enforcing authorization policies across applications, data, and APIs. This central management ensures that enterprises maintain consistency and visibility over all access control policies, regardless of where they are enforced. The platform supports integration with existing IAM systems, enabling enterprises to scale authorization across hybrid and cloud environments effortlessly.

Authorizers are components or services that enforce authorization decisions in a system by evaluating access requests against predefined policies. In the context of an advanced authorization platform like PlainID, Authorizers serve as integration points between the system that makes the access decision (Policy Decision Point, or PDP) and the actual resources being accessed, such as APIs, databases, or applications.

How Authorizers Work:

1. Policy Enforcement: Authorizers enforce access control by communicating with the central policy management system. When a user or system makes an access request, the Authorizer checks the relevant policy and determines whether to allow or deny the request.
2. Real-Time Access Decisions: Authorizers can work in real time, dynamically applying policies based on various factors like user attributes, context, resource type, and business rules.

Distributed Enforcement: Authorizers can be deployed across different environments (e.g., on-premises, cloud, microservices) to ensure that authorization is consistently enforced at all entry points to data or services.